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I will admit that I often find myself, when considering Bill McKibben, in the position of that small child upon first seeing Randolph Churchill. Wanting to ask someone, well, "What's that man for?" So by no means should you take this as being an unbiased comment. But his latest idea is that because the fossil fuel companies cause climate change, and as storms like Sandy are made worse by climate change, then we should start calling the storms after the companies not people:

As gutsy New Yorkers begin the task of drying out the city, here's one thought that occurred to me last night watching the horrifying pictures from a distance. It's obviously not crucial right now – but in the long run it might make a difference. Why don't we stop naming these storms for people, and start naming them after oil companies? ... The fossil fuel companies have played the biggest role in making sure we don't slow global warming down. They've funded climate denial propagandists and helped pack Congress with anti-environmental extremists, making sure that commonsense steps to move toward renewable energy never happen. So maybe it's only right that we should honour their efforts by naming storms for them from now on. At the very least it's fun to imagine the newscasters announcing, "Exxon is coming ashore across New Jersey, leaving havoc in her wake", or "Chevron forces evacuation of 375,000".

Which is of course nonsense, entire argle bargle.

For it isn't true at all that the fossil fuel companies strap us down and insist that we partake of their products. We are not placed in a straitjacket and force fed oil, no one comes around at night and illicitly sprinkles coal on the backyard and no one at all pipes gas into our cookers so that we must burn it or blow the house up.

Far from it in fact: we demand, by waving our money at them, that these companies offer us these fossil fuels. For we rather like being able to drive places, cook food, heat water and survive a Mid-West winter without having to melt the ice on the pitcher each morning. It is we that demand that we're able to continue doing this civilisation thing which carbon based fuels allow.

Sure, there are indeed alternatives to them. Unfortunately, all these alternatives, the wind, solar, geothermal, they're all still more expensive than fossil fuels. I agree, it's highly likely that they won't be real soon now but for the moment they are. In fact, that's precisely where the whole climate change problem is. If all the renewables really were cheaper than fossil fuels then we'd all switch over to using them yesterday and there wouldn't be climate change. As you may have noted, we didn't switch yesterday: for the obvious reason that they're not cheaper yet.

And that's where McKibben is being so nonsensical. The fossil fuel companies are responding to our desires. They profit from providing these fuels precisely because we desire them, are willing to pay money for them and are willing to pay more for them than they cost to provide. That's what profit is: the difference between what the consumer is willing to pay for it and the cost of delivering it to that same consumer.

Climate change is indeed a problem and one that I at least am certain is something we ought to do something about. But the problem isn't in the fossil fuel companies: the problem is in us. Which, of course, is why naming hurricanes after corporations is nonsensical. They're not the problem: we are.